E. Bruce Moore spent much of his childhood in Pratt, Kansas, but when he was twelve, he moved with his family to Wichita, a city with which he would maintain ties for the rest of his life. There, an acquaintance with local artists sparked Moore's interest in art and in 1920 he began formal art training at the Kansas City Art Institute. From 1922 to 1926 he studied under Albert Laessle and Charles Grafly at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, where he was awarded a William Emlen Cresson Traveling scholarship in 1925-26.
During the 1920s, Moore exhibited his work at the Wichita Art Association, the Pennsylvania Academy, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. In 1929, he won a Guggenheim Fellowship which allowed him to travel and study in France and Switzerland.
Following his marriage to Alice Hugli in Lausanne in 1931, Moore returned to Wichita, established a studio, and became an instructor of sculpture at Wichita University. He worked briefly for Paul Manship in 1933 and was then employed by James Earle Fraser in Connecticut and New York. Among the projects on which he worked with Fraser were sculptures for the National Archives building in Washington and an equestrian of Roosevelt for the Museum of Natural History in New York. The M. R. Cromwell Fellowship of the American Academy at Rome allowed Moore to study there and to travel thoughout Italy and Greece from 1937 to 1939. In the last year he returned to the United States and set up a studio in New York where he worked on various government projects during the war. In 1942 he was made director of the Rinehart School of Sculpture at the Maryland Institute in Baltimore, and in 1950, he moved his studio and home to Washington, D. C.
Meanwhile, he exhibited often in Wichita and taught summer classes there and at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington into the 1960s.
Moore was best known for his sculptures of animals, several examples of which are at Brookgreen Gardens, South Carolina. Among his larger works are the National Memorial of the Pacific, Honolulu; two sets of memorial doors for Grace Cathedral, San Francisco; and an monumental statue of General Billy Mitchell in the Smithsonian Institution's Air and Space Museum, Washington. Moore designed many objects for the Steuben Glass company including the Queen's Cup (collection of H.R.H. Queen Elizabeth II).
At the National Academy, Moore won the Ellin P. Speyer Memorial Prize in 1935 for Pelican Fountain (cat. no. 92, see below), and the Helen Foster Barnett Prize in 1937 for St. Francis (cat. no. 268). In 1951, the Academy commissioned him to design the Samuel F. B. Morse Medal for which he was awarded the Saltus Medal the following year.
